Ivor Horton's Beginning Java™ 2, JDK™ 5th Edition

22.6. XML Namespaces

Even though they are very simple, XML namespaces can be very confusing. The confusion arises because it is so easy to make assumptions about what they imply when you first meet them. Let's look briefly at why you have XML namespaces in the first place, and then see what an XML namespace actually is.

You saw earlier that an XML document can have only one DOCTYPE declaration. This can identify an external DTD by a URI or include explicit markup declarations, or it may do both. What happens if you want to combine two or more XML documents that each has its own DTD into a single document? The short answer is that you can't—not easily anyway. Since the DTD for each document will have been defined without regard for the other, element name collisions are a real possibility. It may be impossible to differentiate between different elements that share a common name, and in this case major revisions of the documents' contents as well as a new DTD will be necessary to deal with this. It won't be easy.

XML namespaces are intended to help deal with this problem. They enable names used in markup to be qualified so that you can make duplicate names that are used in different markup unique by putting them in separate namespaces. An XML namespace is just a collection of element and attribute names that is identified by a URI. Each name in an XML namespace is qualified by the URI that identifies the namespace. Thus, different XML namespaces may contain common names without ...